Collected Agenda Scene Wiki

The Knickerbocker

26 min read

The Knickerbocker

Article

The Knickerbocker is a recurring venue in the Collected Agenda archive, appearing 5 times across 5 issues between May 19, 2024 and August 14, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “dinner at The Knickerbocker; coziest restaurant and the best steak in New York”; “I go to dinner late at The Knickerbocker. It’s my favorite restaurant”; “The Knickerbocker ($90 for Thanksgiving Pre Fixe at The Coziest Restaurant In The World)“. It most often appears alongside Chloe Pingeon, Confessions, KGB.

Metadata

  • Category: Venues
  • Mention count: 5
  • Issue count: 5
  • First seen: May 19, 2024
  • Last seen: August 14, 2025

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

COLLECTED AGENDA #1
May 19, 2024 · Original source
Raining in the evening, but I still want to walk to Chelsea after work. Lecture with Bill Armstrong at the School for Visual Art. I don’t typically find photo theory interesting, but I do like career retrospective lectures, and the artist blurs the images in ways I really like. Later, dinner at The Knickerbocker; coziest restaurant and the best steak in New York. The only steak house in New York. Ordering - dirty martini, cocktail shrimp, medium aged rib eye with onion rings, creamed spinach, mashed potatoes
Inline links: Bill Armstrong, The Knickerbocker
Statues Of Critics.
September 10, 2024 · Original source
WHAT I DID Thanks for reading Chloe Pingeon's Substack! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Monday, September 2 I’ve been freelancing this summer, going back to school for a degree in cultural criticism. I'm hesitant to share any of this, I’m hesitant to share any purpose I have in mind for myself. I would like to tell people I spend my time lying listless in the sun. I tell a friend I’m getting my master’s in cultural criticism and he rolls his eyes. God, people like you need to be put out of your misery, he says. He’s a crude man, prone to social faux pas often intentional and sometimes not, and so I don’t take the thinly veiled death threat personally. I do balk in the face of the fact that I worry he might be right. I’ve been suspecting this for a while, actually. There’s a neurosis in my specific brand of ambition that turns it sordid when given too much thought. There’s a vulgarity in anything that too smugly equates fact and opinion. There’s a vulgarity in voyeurism. They don’t build statues of critics. Etc, etc, etc. I go to dinner late at The Knickerbocker. It’s my favorite restaurant, a better restaurant in winter, but my favorite nonetheless. Fall is in the air. You can really feel it here, where everything is dark wood and heavy steaks. I’m so sick of talking about the seasons. I woke up unhappy, but by evening everything is good. Tuesday, September 3 Evening, I’m at VERA’s panel on alternative art spaces at GONZO’S. Conor is moderating, and the alternative gallerists are talking about their alternative galleries. I’m familiar with most of the speakers, but there was only one seat left when I arrived, a bench in the corner and I probably shouldn’t have taken it but I did. From my corner, I can’t see the panel, but enjoy the anonymity afforded only to me. I can hear perfectly, but I have no idea who’s talking. The crux of the conversation centers around the morality and the logistics of these alternative spaces. Given my usual sensibilities, I am surprised that I am most interested in the economics of it all. A commercial gallery can be more interesting than a museum now, because a museum is beholden to its institutional backing. A commercial gallery is beholden only to the market, which has broader interests than a tastemaker on the board of the Guggenheim. An alternative gallery is beholden to… the artist, a different market, the same market but they’re a bit less beholden? A crime reporter turned Artnet reporter poses the question after the panel- besides a difference in commercial scale, how is an alternative gallery different from a blue chip gallery? He’s met with a slew of solid responses; different in the work they show, in the degree of risk taken on emerging artists, in the literal space they operate out of, which might be entirely unconducive to sales and profit. Afterwards, I try to smoke a cigarette on the Gonzo’s balcony and I’m asked to go outside. I go to a bar, I’m not drinking tonight, my friends go home and so do I. When I tell my boyfriend about the reporter's question, he rolls his eyes. Alt is a word you use to make obscure things relevant, he says. If you’re alt till you die, then you just never really made it. In the case of the artist, I think his point is often true. For a gallery, though, the things on the edges are always changing. Technically, one could champion the periphery forever, although longevity matters less with these things. Technically, too, everything one touched could turn to gold. Wednesday, September 4 Every gallery on Henry Street is having an opening tonight. I get there on the late side but it’s still like a block party outside, like Time Again this summer, like these are all the tiniest galleries in the world so there’s a few people milling inside but mostly everyone is on the street. In terms of the work, I like the Laurie Simmons show by far the best, but that isn’t really the point. There’s probably something to be said here about alternative galleries and about how these openings are actually fun and about how the crowds from each space here are spilling into each other and overlapping, but I can’t think of a point that’s not painfully obvious. These openings are actually fun. That’s kind of the thesis. Thursday, September 5 I’m reading at Confessions on Sunday. I write myself some prompts: I AM OVERFLOWING WITH GRATITUDE
Inline links: The Knickerbocker, VERA’s, GONZO’S, Conor, Time Again, Laurie Simmons, Confessions
Collected Agenda (lite)
November 26, 2024 · Original source
For a feast, the grapevine of my New York City-local friends and acquaintances who can’t cook recommend — Lucien ($85 for cauliflower soup, organic turkey, and pumpkin pie), or The Knickerbocker ($90 for Thanksgiving Pre Fixe at The Coziest Restaurant In The World).
Inline links: Lucien, The Knickerbocker
February Dining.
February 10, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, February 3 I think I will spend some nights alone in the apartment, actually, this week. I think I will give myself some peace, then. Yes, this is good, this is what you should do. And I will call David who will be in Paris, and I will see my friends and I will go to school, I will walk across the Williamsburg Bridge by myself in the mornings, I will run sometimes, and write sometimes, and I will be all alone but I will have my friends to see, David to call, and on the weekend there will be my family, and it will all reset me in a way that is pure and nice and I am craving. Ok, tomorrow, then. So, today, then, you begin the morning with the collecting of the self. You have been doing everything one should do, yes - water, lemon, ginger, avocado, salmon, the apartment is messy but not too bad, you are mostly on time, liquor sometimes in excess but you are not a child anymore, not mostly, mostly it's ok. You stay up late, but this is not too bad. You have never spent the night in a house alone before, never, not even once, in a hotel a few times but never in a place that you must enter, unlock, remember to lock again behind you. I'm terrified of many things, really. You might not know this meeting me but then, I give away a lot. I said I had no object permanence. I said this for a while, but I stopped meaning it around April. I stopped saying it around then, too. I have so much object permanence these days. You know this, because you notice how one detail is not as you remember it, and suddenly all you want is for everything, everything, everything to be restored. There was a wonderful dinner last night. The best in a while, really. We returned to The Knickerbocker, and you wonder, then, why you ever go anywhere else - the quiet dark wood dining room, not quite cavernous but certainly not small, the liquor on the grand piano, that huge t-bone steak, enough to serve a family, creamed spinach, french fries with the sauce from the meat au poivre, jazz on Sundays, tea, coffee, no martinis tonight but those are excellent too. Why did we ever go out for small plates? It is so much more special here. Raining, outside. The rain turns to snow. Yellow cab home. It feels nice, yes, to leave things on terms like these. Tuesday, February 4 Silver light in the morning. Ruby say’s - “it’s spring outside,” and I haven’t been waiting for things to melt, but I am not too sad now that this defrosting has started. I am really not too sad today. You wake up, you see silver light, you see curtains, the apartment felt eerie and so you walked over here, there are friends to call, you did not sleep too well but the paralysis has stopped and even this, the drama of it all, the sleep paralysis has stopped, and so this dread of isolation becomes absurd. Bright morning. You walk to get coffee. This spot is called Dreamer, Ruby says. You walk the Williamsburg Bridge. It's warmer this time, busier this time. David calls - there is mayhem in Paris, but he will be ok. Green tea. Lemon loaf. Protein bar. You have stopped being cruel, now you must stop eating sugar. I am very tired today. I don’t mean it to sound all like I’m disassociated. I was, for a moment. I came back down to Earth. I called my dad after Doomers last week. “This is what I'm afraid of,” I said. Then, I told him what I was afraid of. “There's a great show called The Twilight Zone,” my dad said. “I know,” I said. “In The Twilight Zone, there is an episode with a preserved floating brain,” my dad said. “And you watch this disembodied consciousness preserved and stuck forever, and you think, well this is the worst thing imaginable.” “Yes,”I said. “This is what I am afraid of.” It is less the AI of it all being preserved forever in the absence of animal beings that is so scary, I think. More so, it’s this merging with humanity, this always merging merging merging with humanity, and then you are stuck, and then the possibilities become limitless. Wednesday, February 5 Deep familiarity is many different things at many different moments, I am told today. I kind of disagree. I think there is a core of things. Actually, I really disagree. I really think that there is a core of things. New album by Desire today. New dress on my doorstep. I wake up in an apartment that is briefly all mine. Where were you a year ago today, my friends were asking at dinner yesterday. It's a reasonably interesting thing to consider. I like it best when a year ago feels very distant. Me - I was at KGB Bar. A stranger took the photo. I look very morose. In my memory I was very nervous, and also, I was very pleased. On a walk, trying to write, trying to pour out the sludge, seeking clarity - "I do not feel like writing a whole fucking retrospective every time I try to journal," I write. I am sorry all my details seem crude today. Rules for solitude are - pace in circles, pace on the treadmill, do not be combative in conversation with strangers, do not eavesdrop, sometimes you will not like what you hear. They are talking about murder suicide at pilates, the girl at pilates owned an animal shelter and her star employee murder suicided himself and his girlfriend. You know that cute blonde blogger, she is saying. She was the girlfriend. The guy seemed nice. You never know. Rules for solitude are do not listen to these things, stop listening to these things, you’re going to freak out if you keep on listening to these things. Later, I'm only here to pick up a phone charger, but there's a whole wall of people reading poems about bitter cynicism in this conference room. I apologize for my bitter cynicism, the woman reading is saying, and I hate being in these buildings after dark, I hate the corporate flair to these things. Powerade Zero on the desks. I would like to go lurk in a Chinatown basement. I would like to write an Alt Lit Novel. I would like to be very, very rude. "Would you like to read a list of people who have been censored," a woman at this strange event asks me. "Have you seen a phone charger?" I ask the women. "Now is not the time to be nihilistic," Madelyn’s friend told her yesterday, and I’m not nihilistic, and I'm sorry, and I'm really sorry, and I really really really need to leave now. Thursday, February 6 Ice and snow over my glass house this morning. I heard the sharp rain in the night. I am not surprised it froze over. I am enjoying waking up with - nowhere to go, no one to see. I wouldn't enjoy it for long, but it’s not too bad for now. Walking through this empty apartment and the only sound is me, and then ice falling off the roof overhead. It’s not a big deal, really, and I'm acting a little delusional and insane about the weight of it all, but it's just that I have never done this before - woken up in a building with no one to greet me. And I have tucked my phone far away so that the solitude can feel more complete. And I have cleaned the apartment, top to bottom. I've wrapped an old scarf all around my face and then I've gone for a walk - no matter that the streets are frozen. I do like the ice. I'm sorry. I do. I hope it lasts. The night is swirling and nice. I forgot to take note. Friday, February 7 My parents are here, and I am glowing with the happiness of it. Start the day slowly. I’ve become a bit reckless. I’ll do the dishes. I’ll take out the trash. Intrinsically sloppy, and I wish I wasn’t. When left to my own devices, a descent into chaos is not entirely inevitable. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Monday, February 10 From 7pm - 9pm at Virginia’s — Date Time thinks it’s not too late to find a valentine. The three girls behind a new Feed Me featured speed dating endeavor present their second event, featuring two 45 min rounds of mingling. - “Everyone meets everyone, so get ready to meet a lover, a friend, or perhaps an enemy.” $5 ticket required for entry (proceeds to Direct Relief in LA), and 1 drink minimum to date.
Inline links: The Knickerbocker, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!jT0J!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa10ab1b7-6b48-4c06-bc6b-0fb7469a4168_1179x652.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!P3e1!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb447089e-a6d6-4835-9402-c87fbc6be315_1200x1600.jpeg, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!uWjI!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fd9c23aa1-399d-4139-beee-26b409d77757_909x608.jpeg, Virginia’s, Date Time, Feed Me featured
Do you find everything interesting? Have you ever been bored? Was your last emotion in 2015?
August 14, 2025 · Original source
WHAT I DID Monday, July 28 Amelia is at the apartment when I arrive, bearing cloned keys and summer dresses. It is not a relief to return, I am afraid. Tiptoe across dusty slanted floors and this sense of oddity and dread creeps back no matter how quiet I am about it. There are planes overhead and I have loved all this glass before, but I am clenching my eyes shut now; wishing for drapes that close. Earlier, the flight from London was delayed hours upon hours and things went awry the moment I was left alone. Comparing notes of past present and future and then I laid my roller suitcase horizontal on the bathroom floor to take a seat and think about it. Left my passport in the airport bar where the woman beside me was making friends with every single customer cycling through aside from myself and then I sprinted over to security, where the lights were flashing all schizophrenic and neon and no one would speak. You'll miss your flight, dear, the airport attendant smiled. They opened a small door with a large electric key. They sent me to the Back Rooms. They sent me through endless identical silver doors and a mirror maze and down a long gray magic carpet. I emerged on the other side to find another magic carpet just like the first. I imagined infinite magic carpets extending in every direction. Motion activated so the feedback loop would reveal itself every time I thought I reached solid ground. I was not moving horizontal anymore. It was a vertical descent into the underbelly of Heathrow. I forgot the status of Boeing VS0137. I forgot to ever leave. I woke up in the Kids Play Center. We've lifted your curse, the airport attendant beamed. Most slides can also be used as rafts, they tell me on the plane. Cartoon villain voice playing on Virgin-Atlantic-TV and they're blasting it through the cabin speakers, too. You were an A+ travel companion, they told me in the airport. I wake up to take stock of these things: safety guidelines and praise. I fall back asleep. Tuesday, July 29 After things fell apart in June, I did not eat or sleep for four days and three nights. On the fourth night, I called the NYPD informational line quite dizzy and more out of curiosity regarding physical resilience and atrophy than out of any sincere safety concern. If you cannot sleep tonight, then you can call me in the morning, the operator said. And so I was unconscious in an instant. Put some limits on one's own neurosis. I decided to stay up late last night. It was muggy and hot outside JFK, and I missed the moors and the fog for just an instant. Then, the glass doors slid open into hot sweaty americana summer and all else was forgotten. Felt a bittersweet sort of close to home. Sat on the curb. The airtrain to the car park turned onto the highway. Felt like a road trip. Felt like team sports, two-in-the-morning, intermission. I'd been so quiet that day. I had not spoken one word since Heathrow. Everybody understood that the apartment was rotting. Great place but full of mold. Great place but full of memories both good and bad. Somebody should have thrown out the milk. Somebody should have done something about the feng shui. The dead trees. The slant of the floors. The roof, which nearly caved in last winter. Three in the morning arrival but I asked Amelia if I could come over instead, and Amelia understood it would be best to sit on her floor. Amelia had been leaning into performance art. How was your vacation, Amelia asked. Not transgressive and weird, I sighed. But rejuvenating, pleasant, precious in the sort of way I'd like to hang onto. And I am feeling physically fit from all the walking and running that went on and on and on. The heat wave has not passed in New York despite one more week dwindling into summer, and I sleep until midday around when I open my eyes and begin to feel uneasy. The lines out the stores are down the block and everyone is becoming very thin. The summer foods are things like GREENS 01 Juice and maca-powder-peanut-butter-protein-bites and very rubbery cocktail shrimp at The Smith. It is Julia who suggests The Smith for dinner and I am not picky with those sorts of things. It is me who suggests the party, despite my increasing hopes, generally, to avoid these sorts of things. Wednesday, July 30 Sitting at Banter with the Big Breakfast and hot green tea reading fairytales. It was a nice night last night. Whirling sort of thing. Nightclub101 to KGB to following a group to Ludlow House to Ripple Room. The sort of thing I like as often as possible, but really must limit to now and then. Sitting at the Australian Cafe now, using my Moldavite to mark my place in my book. The fairytales are describing relentless compassion as a form of some sort of psychological warfare. Psychosexual manipulation. Relentless compassion so as to provide one with a moral advantage, knowing it is impossible for the recipient of such compassion to reciprocate. Relentless compassion so as to cast a desperate, selfish, striving plea for reciprocation. The second option is probably more common, but it would be nice to be kind of on a high horse. August will be like oysters at The Knickerbocker with the cocktail sauce in the martini glass and we're sitting by the cracked glass window and Drew says don't cut your hair not yet and so it'll be like humid heavy hair almost down to my waist now, sparkling water in plastic cups with lime and diet coke in a bikini and I will stay put for a while. I will sit at KGB sober in the evening like I do most every evening. They're tearing chocolate chip cookies apart with their hands at the table over and Amelia says she thinks a bit too much about herself to give too much thought to the existence of God but she remembers, as a child, crying tears of joy because she couldn't believe her luck. She just realized she had somehow made it into a human body on Earth, and she couldn't believe her luck. I don't wish the evenings went on too much longer. The timing is starting to feel just right. I want to fill a Desani water bottle with white claw and catch a cab to a pool party but the evening might start to feel too late. I'll read Fanny Howe, Thomas Hardy, Dawn Powell on the floor - big cracked hard cover dog eared copies of all my books. Then, I will pack up my books into Ikea plastic storage trunks. I will pack up all my books and dresses and then the movers will come. The movers will haul my things out the door. They will haul the place bare. I will turn off the air conditioning in this glass apartment in the sky, and then I will leave. August will be somewhere else. Thursday, July 31 Rebecca and I are making plans. Involving - The Chakras by C.W. Leadbeater and Esoteric Healing by Alice Bailey. I don’t want to work harder than I ever have before, but I do wish to be a bit more intuitive about it. Rebecca is telling me about Energy Hygiene in a Chaotic City. Rebecca is telling me about Seven Rays & Soul Typing. Taking Thomas Pynchon, guasha, monastery sage oil, yoga mat, mineral sunscreen up to the roof for Abundance Meditation and Contemplation. I receive good news. The best, really. I am sorry to be opaque, but something shifted in the winds in England. So far, I have managed to hold onto it here. Careful! Open up the blinds because it's foggy this morning which means we get to let some light in. No bright sunlight baking things alive. No leftover drinks or snacks from the Last Party Ever that was thrown last night. So - it’s a very strange day. I’d like to take a different approach to Caution. Generate me a definition. They generate me this definition: The deeper awareness of human limitations, the deceptive nature of false certainties, and the dangers of unchecked power. This will do. Friday, August 1 It’s an unusual sort of incoherence in my dreams today. The shelf above the bed is lined with wine glasses full of water, and there's an in between of sleep and something else - nyquil at six in the morning, cinnamon zyn at six in the morning, the friends went home around six in the morning and now it is sometime around noon, sunlight streaming in. I wake up gagging. In my dreams, the wine glass water was mostly poisoned. In the space between half awake, not all was poisoned but it was a Russian Roulette sort of thing. I take my chances. Chug water out of my safest bet. Wake up screaming. Fall asleep screaming. The Ikea boxes for the move are starting to fill up and I know it's me stuffing the plastic to the brim but I don't really remember. It's been recollection that's lacking, really. It's been a birthday dinner tonight. The sweetest kind in the Lower East Side. Dimes Square but it's just us, I said. Because it was in the general vicinity but the streets were all empty. A stupid joke, but everyone humored me. Everyone was beautiful and lovely and happy and I didn't drink a regrettable amount. A nice sort of night. Got stuck on Thomas Pynchon and now I can't read anything else. Got stuck on esoteric health and now the water is poison. Got stuck at karaoke and now my self proclaimed sulfate allergy is acting up. Wine and hypochondria. It becomes a bit self indulgent then, doesn't it? Saturday, August 2 If the movers weren't late, I'd be gone by now. But they are late, and so I am lying on the couch that’s being left behind in an Everlane striped tee and too-short Los Angeles apparel shorts feeling kind of sorry for myself. I'm not sure why I decided to scrounge up this sort millennial slop getup for the day of my very unceremonious departure. Feeling older than my years. Feeling like I was raised on Madewell and Ann Taylor or, whatever else it is that would feel nostalgic if I'd been born before 2000. Something other than Patagonia shorts and my sister's sweaters, anyways. Feeling culturally un-attuned. Feeling mostly sorry for myself because I am surrounded by grime. I've been flouncing around this place for a while, now. The clutter is so repulsive, and so much of it is new. There was never a day of really moving in, here. It was just step by step, one thing after another, little parcels that were easy to bring up and down and in and out and now; you wake up in the middle of the morning in a glass apartment in the sky to the sense that there is no space left. I would love to toss and toss and toss. I would love to close my eyes on this island of this couch amidst a swamp of Ikea boxes and tell the movers never mind. I would never open the boxes again. I would never do the dishes. I would wear polyester and sleep on the previous owners teak Scandinavian couch. I would sleep surrounded by trash. It would all become trash, because I would decide to throw it all out. What do we need to know?, the movers will ask, when they arrive. Do you find everything interesting? I will ask. Have you ever been bored? Was your last emotion in 2015? YAY, the movers will say. I am picking things up and putting them down. The movers will give me high fives. Me and three Serbian teens high-fiving in a glass apartment in the sky that I am soon to leave and never return. They will pick things up and put them down and haul them out and I will never return. Sunday, August 3 I have taken my things and never returned. All is well except, the lights here are a bit too fluorescent. The courtyard is nice for the turtle pond, but the brick blocks the sun. And, once there was a top lock but now there is not. There is a hole in my door and I can't get it out of my head. There is a hole in my door and now everything is all wrong. Sitting at GMT Tavern with a not very nice martini and the Thomas Pynchon book I just can’t finish or quit. Slow Learner. Slow Learner, just like me. Make it all about me me me. Life is like: another day in my dumb life on my dumb blog talking about me me me. Life does not have to be like this. Life could be like: the hovering curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion (Pynchon). I keep getting stuck on that quote. I keep getting stuck on entropy, which I do not hope to believe in. WHAT YOU SHOULD DO Thursday, August 14 From 9pm at Silver Lining Lounge — Matt Weinberger and Scott Lipps present The Downtown Prom. Hosts include Sid Simons, Anika Jade Levy, Nicole Naloy, and more. Music by Sexy Damion, Blog Analog, Loose Buttons, and Boxxer. DJ sets and more.
Inline links: Matt Weinberger, Scott Lipps, The Downtown Prom

Graph View

Backlinks